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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29669082">holding my breath with a baseball bat</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/SolaSola/pseuds/SolaSola'>SolaSola</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dimension 20 (Web Series)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>5+1 Things, Campaign 03 Season 02: The Unsleeping City Chapter II, Character Study, Episode Tag, Episode: c03s02e15 The Unsleeping City: For the Hoard!, F/M, Light Angst, Meta</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 23:40:43</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,519</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29669082</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/SolaSola/pseuds/SolaSola</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>There are six miles to go and a bat in his hand and Esther out there in danger and so Ricky doesn’t need to, doesn’t have time to, can’t make himself think of anything else. </p><p>[5 reasons ricky needed esther's bat + 1 reason he didn't]</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Ricky Matsui/Esther Sinclair</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>56</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>holding my breath with a baseball bat</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written post-ep 15. Ricky is not in a good headspace. Minor warning for canon-typical but not Ricky-typical wishing of grievous bodily harm upon people.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>There are six miles between Clinton Hill and Gramercy, and Ricky feels more than counts them as he runs.</p><p>This isn’t his daily jog with a running app counting his splits, isn’t the fire academy’s training with running cadence songs filling his lungs and those of everyone around him. He’s never been so unaware of the city around him or the impeccably-punctuated texts from Kingston blowing up his phone as the team makes a plan or Sofia and Pete probably left in his dust.</p><p>There are six miles to go and a bat in his hand and Esther out there in danger and so Ricky doesn’t need to, doesn’t have time to, can’t make himself think of anything else. </p><p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p><p>1. the arcane</p><p>It’s Esther’s weapon, her arcane focus, in his hand, coursing with lightning and light. It’s hard to ignore when a weapon comes to life and smashes out of its box to choose you, even if this one doesn’t talk like the Questing Blade did. Does still, just not for him. </p><p>(A part of his brain that Ricky’s never really bothered to turn off notes that the arcane lightning might be a fire risk if it keeps sparking. Thirteen percent of fires are caused by electricity, that part of his brain says, but the lightning doesn’t seem to be hurting him as it arcs over the silver as well as his hand.) </p><p>There were scorched trails of Lightning Bolts all over the walls of their apartment, and Ricky keeps thinking <em> we were thirty seconds late, maybe twenty, maybe even six would have been too late</em>, doing math he’s not good at over and over in his head. </p><p>The pounding of his feet on the sidewalk feels like it’s just the first part of what’s going to be a long and hard and terrible fight to get Gramercy back, to get Esther back, to get New York back because they were <em> too late, too late, too late</em>. The fractal burns of lightning on the walls feel burned into his brain too. It’s a reminder that Esther fought, Ricky keeps telling himself, <em> because she’s Esther and of course she did, and I’m going to fight for her too. </em> </p><p>Usually when he’s running it’s to clear his head, to let himself only think about the cadence and the distance. Now he can’t stop thinking, but each thought feels cut off and not enough.</p><p>
  <em> If we’re too late and we don’t make it— </em>
</p><p>
  <em> If I should have been faster— </em>
</p><p>
  <em> If I should have cast— </em>
</p><p>Lightning keeps arcing around the bat and his hand from a spell Ricky didn’t cast. He’s still trying to hold concentration, shakily, on Locate Object as he runs. By now he’s familiar with the faint glow and the components of it, cast over and over again. With Cody. On a <em> moped</em>. Finding nothing about the hoard they’ve been looking for. Ricky’s starting to hate the spell and the nasty voice in the back of his head reminds him he doesn’t even need to be trying to hold concentration right now because Kingston already told everyone the Order was heading for Gramercy even before Ricky got the ping back.</p><p>Ricky doesn’t think of himself as a stubborn person, but he hasn’t dropped concentration yet. Because his Locate Object is one of so few things he can do, one of so few things he’s been doing to try to help as much as he can. And because his spell isn’t looking out for Gramercy right now.</p><p>He’s holding onto this thread tying him to Esther, and that counts for something as Ricky runs and runs and runs. </p><p>Lightning crackles around his hand, clenched around the bat, and it doesn’t hurt him. Ricky Matsui gets to be a little magic, after all. </p><p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
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</p><p>2. the choices</p><p>It’s his <em>fucking girlfriend’s bat</em> and maybe Ricky’s mind is still reeling from the pregnancy test Sofia found back in their apartment that he hadn’t even had time to look at because if he’s too late getting to Esther <em>right</em> <em>now</em> he’ll never forgive himself. </p><p>Usually it’s not Ricky’s job to know things. It doesn’t feel like betrayal—Sofia’s his friend and Esther’s too, and he doesn’t mind Sofia knowing. But it does feel like failure—he should have moved faster, he should have known something was wrong faster, he should have found more clues and a faster way to get there than just a too-short Haste spell and Ox and his own all too human feet. His job isn’t to know things but he should know this.</p><p>He should know Esther. </p><p>He should be the kind of person who Esther can trust.</p><p>Esther shouldn’t have to take a pregnancy test alone, shouldn’t have to illusion it into a box of candy in their apartment bathroom.</p><p>Ricky’s brain is spiralling in the way he doesn’t let himself do when Esther’s around, but right now she’s not here to stop him because he didn’t move fast enough.</p><p>But it’s still her bat in his hand, the answer to his call for <em> I need a fucking weapon</em>. </p><p>It’s battered underneath the coursing arcane lightning and there’s probably a good reason that her mom and grandma wanted to retire it, now that he’s holding it up close. There’s a scorch mark on the end cap from where Lightning Bolt always comes out, and there’s a big scratch on the metal of the barrel that Ricky’s pretty sure is from when she chucked it ten feet to the side when she tackled him in Times Square. Their first kiss. </p><p>Ricky needs a weapon, needs to save his girlfriend, and Esther’s silver bat slammed into his hand. No matter how much Ricky’s brain is telling him he didn’t do enough, didn’t move fast enough, didn’t protect her enough, there’s a weapon in his hand that chose him and it chose Esther first.</p><p>He may never live up to his badass girlfriend’s history of wielding this weapon, because he might not be able to use it to cast spells or channel the force of a whole storm’s worth of lightning. But this bat was Esther’s first and maybe now it’s <em> theirs </em> together, if it answered his call. Ricky chose Esther, and Esther chose him, and he’s going to make these choices mean something. </p><p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
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</p><p>3. the game</p><p>His grip tightens on the bat and he can’t help but remember the last time he played ball, playing catch at the Hall of Heroes at Yankee Stadium. More than any aura or ability or sacred axe, that was what being the bearer of the Questing Blade had meant for him. Ricky’s running towards Gramercy but he’s still holding the bat in a door-knocker grip, all his knuckles lined up, and he lets himself smile at the memory. </p><p>Ricky’s not sure if he’s ever seen Esther actually hit a baseball with this bat (Her mom and grandma might frown at that. <em> Look like you’re heading to practice,</em> Gabriela says in his head). It was fun though, at the Hall. Maybe that’s a date idea to file for later.</p><p><em> When was the last time I played ball like that</em>, Ricky wonders idly, because as much as he’s running and keeping concentration on the spell he’s also running a route he runs every week from Brooklyn to Manhattan. It’s not so much one last time as much as it is a childhood blur. It’s years and years of Saturday toddler t-ball and then Little League and then baseball practice, all up through high school when it’d been a nice thing to have on his fire academy applications. </p><p>Ricky thinks about t-ball practice, about his dad’s weathered hands around his own showing him how to hold a bat for the first time, about passing down his old catching gloves to Emiko because her hands were so small but she’d wanted to play with her big brother too. Maybe that’s a sibling bonding activity for file for later. It’s probably been even longer since Emiko played softball than it’s been for him. Ricky wonders why he’d let it go. Long hours at the fire station, probably.</p><p>It’s the hand-me-down gloves he’d already broken in for Emiko; it’s grass stains on inconveniently white pants that his mom always sighed over; it’s his dad volunteering to coach his teams for years even when he had to pick up books to learn how Little League rules worked first. It’s such an all-American Brooklyn childhood and it was his, through no small work at all, and years later it still makes him smile. </p><p>It’s always been a certainty for him that someday he wants to be that parent coaching kids of his own, wants to be the one they can bring dirt-streaked, grass-stained laundry home to too. And for the past three years he and Esther have been living dangerously, yes, but maybe Ricky’s also started to imagine it more concretely. Little kids with Esther’s hair and his eyes and toddling steps. Maybe. </p><p>Ricky spins the bat a little in his hand to focus and he still remembers the right grip after all these years, muscle memory like the comfortable way Ricky’s always been able to think about the future and the past.</p><p>There’s going to be a future after this fight, a future where Gramercy will live and the city will live and Esther and Ricky and Sofia and Kingston and Iga and Pete and Cody and Rowan will live. It’s a future where Ricky can go to the park and tease his sister about how out of practice she is and tease his girlfriend about how she’s never used the baseball bat she carried every day for years to actually, you know, play baseball. </p><p>He’s going to fight to let that future happen. </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>4. the sorrow</p><p>It’s the Bat of Sorrow or something like that, if he’s remembering Esther’s mom’s explanation right, which isn’t really something he’d ever realized before. The bat was just cool, but this makes it cooler. It’s Esther’s bat in his hand and it’s easy to think about Esther, not when a solid forty (fifty. Sometimes sixty. Who’s counting.) percent of Ricky’s brain is pretty much always thinking about Esther anyway. Even so, sometimes he forgets, three years later in this life they’ve made, how close Esther was to becoming a Fury. His girlfriend’s really freaking cool, Ricky thinks, for overcoming something so huge. The bat was cool, but so is the staff she’s got now. It helps that he can use this one while keeping Locate Object up on the staff, so that’s a point in its favor.</p><p>Ricky’s not the most observant guy, but even he could see for the long months he knew her before the cursebreaking that Esther didn’t let herself be sad, didn’t even let herself be happy for years. </p><p>Ricky thinks about screaming into a bubble of shadowy silence, thinks about running miles and miles through the city in the rain because if he was upset and maybe crying he would pass people by fast enough for them not to see it, and he thinks he understands, a little bit, how terrible it must have been. </p><p>Ricky thinks about how he wants to spend the rest of his life being lit up incandescently by Esther’s smile when she lets herself be happy, really gleefully happy with her nose scrunched up so kissably when she laughs, but he also thinks about how he wants to spend the rest of his life being the person whose shirt she can soak with tears when she lets herself be sad. Ricky’s realizing with every step closer to Esther that he wants—well, he wants more than he maybe would have admitted to himself before. He wants to feel her nose digging into his stomach when she stumbles in the door and just shoves her whole face into his chest for a hug. He wants to be trusted with the immensely powerful but also horrible everyday thing that is Esther Sinclair’s sorrow. He wants always to be able to take some of it for her, if he can.</p><p>Ricky looks at the Bat of Sorrow shining in his hands and tries to rearrange the words in his brain because he’s not the best with words but the ones in his head are getting dangerously close to “for better or for worse, in sickness and in health.” </p><p>Sometimes Esther just needs to cry, a new thing after decades of no tears allowed, and at those times Ricky can’t take it from her but he can hold her close the whole time. Sorrow is gutting and horrible but in Esther’s hands it’s also a weapon, a reminder of what she fights and works for after she’s all cried out and she kisses Ricky a soft <em> thank you</em>. </p><p>Ricky isn’t letting himself think about the end of the sentence that starts with <em> what if we’re too late </em> because there might already be tears at the corner of his eyes that he’s choosing to blame on the wind and the speed he’s running. If Esther isn’t there, if Esther isn’t fighting when he gets there, the bat might not be the only thing of sorrow he’s carrying. </p><p>Ricky Matsui loves Esther Sinclair, in a way that makes him think that what he’s been training for his whole life is just to be strong enough to hold her when her shoulders shake. He’s carrying his own sorrow, but he’s going to make it. </p><p>He has to. </p><p> </p><p>
  <br/>
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</p><p>5. the bludgeon</p><p>Ricky’s been wielding axes he probably shouldn’t be carrying if he’s not a firefighter and swords that demand a humility he maybe can’t muster and new-feeling magic that still emerges from his fingertips feeling more like it belongs to Kingston or maybe to Esther than it does to him. </p><p>But Ricky knows how to hold a bat, even if it’s coursing with lightning and shimmering silver in a way that a normal aluminum Louisville slugger doesn’t do. He doesn’t need to be a wizard to know this. </p><p>There’s so little finesse to this. It’s so much heavier in his hand than any weapon he’s carried before, but he’s more sure about what to do with it than he’s been sure about anything for months.</p><p>He doesn’t even know how much of a sentence he’d gotten out to Sofia and Pete after he’d seen Tony’s little green bubble of text pop up on Sofia’s phone. <em> And a sweet hello. From me and your friend Esther.  </em></p><p><em> Non-entities </em> , Ricky keeps thinking, <em> at best we were non-entities to each other</em>, and now he’s gone from maybe barely being able to bring Tony Simos’ face to mind if he tries to now being able to visualize, perfectly, the way this heavy silver bat is going to arc into his skull. </p><p>
  <br/>
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</p><p>+1. the start</p><p>He’s Ricky Matsui, and there are six miles between him and Esther Sinclair that need to become none. The bat slams into his hand and Ricky doesn’t even need the momentum because he’s already running, running, running, faster than he’s ever needed to run before. </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Title from Mitski's "Townie," which is fully not about what this fic is about. </p><p>I wrote this fic to get it out of my head, mostly, but also I'm pspspsing at Episode 16 tomorrow for the battle couple Rickyesther we might not deserve but that we definitely need. Also, shoutout to <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/supercantaloupe">supercantaloupe</a> for helping me do the math on how long it'd take Ricky to make the six mile run with Pete's Haste spell and also Ox's movement, a detail that did not make it into the fic but that deserves a shoutout anyway for undertaking D&amp;D math. (It's about 25 minutes compared to the usual two hours). </p><p>Kudos and comments are even better than a Spaghetti's cannoli, and I reply to every one!</p><p>This fic is rebloggable <a href="https://mordredmanor.tumblr.com/post/643971293438525440/holding-my-breath-with-a-baseball-bat-solasola">here</a> on my tumblr <a href="https://mordredmanor.tumblr.com/">@mordredmanor</a>.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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